Friday, March 28, 2025
An exhibit, celebrating Valley Stream’s own Leonard Lehrman, a composer whose work fuses social consciousness with musical tradition, is being held at the Oyster Bay-East Norwich Public Library during American Music Month.
Known for his politically informed compositions and his stewardship of the library’s Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Lehrman spent decades using music to address a wide variety of social issues ranging from immigrant rights to nuclear disarmament.
In this conversation, Lehrman discusses the evolution of his musical career, the traditions he continues to embrace, and his thoughts on how music can shape public discourse, today and in the future.
Leonard Lehrman: As the subtitle of my book describes me as a “socially-conscious, cosmopolitan composer,” I have always believed in music’s power to inspire positive action — and sometimes to spark “good trouble,” in the words of John Lewis. My latest song, “Lady Liberty,” set to a poem by my Harvard classmate Christina Starobin, is both a march and a hymn. I hope it will be sung at rallies supporting immigrants, including by the Solidarity Singers of the NJ Industrial Union Council.
My first musical, “The Comic Tragedy of San Po Jo,” written with Mark Kingdon in 1963, tackled themes of atomic testing and U.S. imperialism, and I believe it encouraged some to march for nuclear disarmament. Other works have honored figures like Sacco and Vanzetti, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Rosa Luxemburg, and the victims of Hiroshima and the Triangle Fire.
Lehrman: My work carries forward several traditions, reflected in the title of my book, Continuator.
One is the tradition of sacred Jewish music. Jordan Friedman of the Society for Classical Reform Judaism Music Subcommittee described my work as “the best of contemporary creativity in Jewish liturgical music while still clearly drawing from the Lewandowski/Sulzer/Binder/Freed/Fromm/Adler/Steinberg tradition.”
Another is Jewish opera, a subject I’ve lectured on in Basel, Vienna, Seattle, and New York. I created and taught the first course on it at Hebrew Union College and composed Hannah, called “the quintessential Jewish opera.” I also engage with American opera, producing a workshop and recital in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with my wife, Helene. Russian opera has been another focus — my mother and I translated works by Glinka, Dargomyzhsky, and Mussorgsky, and four of my own operas are based on Russian texts, including works by Aizman, Sholokhov, and Chekhov.
Political opera and satire have been central to my work, particularly in the tradition of Marc Blitzstein (1905–1964), whose works I’ve adapted or completed. I’ve also worked with the music of Richard Peaslee, Tom Lehrer, Tom Paxton, and Lou & Peter Berryman.
Lehrman: Before becoming a Reference Librarian at Oyster Bay-East Norwich Public Library, I published part of my LIU library Master’s thesis in Wilson Library Bulletin on the role of concerts in libraries. When Billy Joel donated funds for the library to buy a piano, Director Suzanne Koch and I attended a piano sale at Hofstra, where I selected the best from about a hundred available. I also composed a dedicatory piece based on the musical notes in the words “for Oyster Bay-East Norwich Public Library.” The score, framed and displayed above the piano in the Community Room, has been performed in concerts over the years.
Unfortunately, as classical music education has declined, so has its presence in libraries, synagogues, and even churches—once my main source of income after leaving academia for the Metropolitan Opera, followed by seven years in German-speaking theaters across Europe.
One of my proudest achievements at Oyster Bay has been curating the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, which includes scores and concerts of music by his grandson, composer J. Willard Roosevelt (1918–2008). His 80th birthday and centennial were honored with concerts at Oyster Bay Library, Merrick Library, Poquatuck Hall, and Oyster Bay High School. The latter was led by Maestro Stephen J. Walker, director of the Sagamore Hill Band, former president of the Oyster Bay Historical Society, and son of the library’s first director.
Lehrman: During Covid, we launched three Zoom concert series with the Henry Waldinger Memorial Library in Valley Stream, which the library board president said, “put the library on the map.” Since then, we’ve returned to live performances at Pagan-Fletcher and Court Street Music, where our annual house concert is set for Sunday, June 15. The program features new songs of mine and two piano quartets—one by Antonin Dvořák and another by my late composition teacher, Robert M. Palmer, in honor of his 110th birthday.
Right now, I’m focused on writing parts and assembling a children’s chorus for the November production of Sima at Theater for the New City. After that, I need to finish an English translation I promised Alexander Tcherepnin of his completion of Mussorgsky’s opera Zhenit’ba (The Marriage). I also have a Blitzstein project: the Estate has approved me to compose music for a one-act opera based on Bernard Malamud’s The Magic Barrel, using a libretto Blitzstein completed and I edited. I don’t know where it will be produced yet, but I’m confident it will be.
Have an opinion on this article? Send an email to jlasso@liherald.com.
